The relatively compact design and configuration of handguns and pistols facilitates ease in portability and usage. The typical design includes, among other components, a grip to hold the firearm, and a barrel and gun slide located perpendicular to the grip. The location of the ammunition rounds will depend on the type of gun, but often time ammunition rounds are stored in a magazine located within the grip. This location optimizes the use of the handgun dimensions, considering the standard magazine does not require any other separate compartments that would bulk up the handgun. This is particularly important for those that are required to carry a firearm while being mobile or in constricted settings, such as police officers and many military personnel.
Most types of civilian handguns are semi-automatic, in that only one round will be fired with a single trigger pull. A subset of semi-automatic handguns are “autoloaders”, in that the firearm will automatically load a new round to be fired after each successive firing. The typical re-loading mechanism after a round is fired involves the gun slide moving backwards to re-load a new round, and reset the handgun such that it will not fire until the trigger is released and pulled again. A fully automatic weapon differs in this respect in that a pulled and held down trigger results in consecutive rounds being fired.
Fully automatic handguns can be transferred or sold in the U.S. only to federal agencies under Public Law 99-308 (1986). More specifically, fully automatic pistols are typically issued in the modern military as personal side arms to commanding officers and senior NCOs, special forces operatives, and to combat personnel who operate in cramped spaces where an assault rifle or carbine is impractical, such as vehicle drivers, artillery and tank crews, pilots, aircraft and helicopter crews, and marine and naval personnel. However, considering the compact design of a side arm is what offers the user ease in portability, the same compact design limits the number of rounds it is capable of holding without adding more to its size, thereby frustrating the use of such a weapon in automatic firing mode since frequent re-loading of ammunition magazines will be required.
The grip of a gun is primarily designed for the user to hold and safely fire the weapon. Adding a larger magazine generally requires the grip to be larger and can increase the overall dimensions of the pistol and therefore make it incompatible with its intended purpose, unable to be concealed, unwieldy, and even unsafe for a user. Although there are handguns that have magazines oriented below and parallel with the gun barrel, the rounds are oriented perpendicular to the barrel, such that an internal mechanism is required to re-orient the round for firing. Overall, large capacity handguns, particularly those that contain complex mechanisms that increase their size and weight, are much bulkier and more massive than the average small capacity handgun of the same caliber, which make it difficult for them to be used as a sidearm. Moreover, limited capacity handguns not only impact automatic firing but those handguns configured for semi-automatic firing as well, such as for personnel in government agencies that include undercover police officers, which contain a limited round capacity held by current concealable side arm designs.
It should, therefore, be appreciated that there exists a need for a high capacity handgun side arm configured for automatic, semi-automatic, and/or three-burst firing, with minimal to no increase in the overall dimensions and mass of a standard capacity gun, other than the weight of the additional ammunition rounds, and without the need for mechanisms to re-orient the stored ammunition rounds. The present invention fulfils this need and others.